A principal goal of Enlightenment juvenile fiction was to provide
its young readers with moral exemplars. But at a certain moment in
literary history, the exemplary characters that had traditionally
populated juvenile fiction were suddenly pressed and changed by
emergent literary techniques bent on evoking common sympathy rather
than modeling elite moral good. Just as the emergence of historicism in
the late eighteenth century brought the concept of historical process
to bear on classical exemplum history, this book argues, an
analogous claim may be made on behalf of juvenile fiction's exemplary
characters. In both cases, the sense of pedagogical purpose that had
once been foundational, namely "to train us up to private and public
virtue" (1), foundered in an historical moment when reading was
increasingly valued for entertainment rather than moral instruction.

At first, this book seems bent on mapping a key transition in
juvenile fiction: the shift from techniques designed to elicit readerly
emulation of ideal fictional characters, and toward those that elicit
readers' identification with flawed, emotionally-complex characters
that act and feel more fully human. What turns out to occupy Horne,
however, is something less general and more interesting, which is the
continuing influence of the model of emulation. According to Horne, the
movement from exemplary characters (outwardly legible as good or bad)
to what she terms "ordinary" characters (inwardly complex and flawed)
began in the eighteenth century but "did not become the norm" (30) in
juvenile fiction until well into the nineteenth century. This period of
slow transition thus invites us to see how the classical model of
precept persevered right beside the emergent model of sympathetic
identification. At the contact point of the two readerly models, Horne
argues, comes a hybrid genre defined by the simultaneous presence of
didacticism and interiority. Writers working in this hybrid genre "were
still centrally concerned with exemplarity; they just changed the means
by which they hoped to achieve it. By making their child protagonists
less ideal, more 'ordinary,' juvenile writers believed they would
create a sense of identification in their readers . . . which would in
turn foster a stronger reader desire to accept the text's moral
messages than the older, ideal model could in a period increasingly
characterized by the importance of sympathetic engagement with the
other" (33). Around 1800, Horne claims, literary texts developed a form
of sympathetic identification that directly served moral instruction.

In its deliberate re-evaluation of the moral exemplar, this book
cultivates a critical resistance to the progressivist narrative that
celebrates the ascendency of Romanticism at the expense of an earlier
Enlightenment tradition. Horne finds such narratives ultimately
self-serving and therefore inimical to responsible historical study.
Since they set aside or suppress texts that do not conform to the
progressive model, they have also occluded careful study of a great
portion of juvenile literature written in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Perhaps even more significantly, critics have not been
trained to value novels in which characters are "flat" rather than
"round" in E.M. Forster's well-known dyad from AspectsoftheNovel (1927). Forster's dyad is itself a vestige,
Horne suggests, of a teleology that automatically celebrates Romantic
sympathy at the expense of Enlightenment precept. As a result, a
substantial body of important juvenile fiction has remained unread and
unconsidered. Reckoning with this lost tradition requires that we
reassess traditional narratives about the shift from preceptual to
sympathetic literature.

Working with energy and care, Horne examines no less than twelve
works of adolescent fiction written between 1800 and 1840. While doing
so, she avoids classifying them as either Romantic or Victorian, a move
that sometimes inhibits her work but nonetheless gives her freedom to
pursue her provocative argument. Scrutinizing in the first chapter the
juvenile 'robinsonade' (a 'desert island story' after Daniel Defoe's RobinsonCrusoe of 1719), she convincingly describes it as a hybrid genre
that uses elements of both the fantastic and the domestic novel. To
illustrate this genre, she reads David Wyss's TheFamilyRobinsonCrusoe (1812-13, 1814) in the context of
lesser-known works, including Jeanne Sylvie MallÃ¨s de Beaulieu's Lerobinsondedouzeans (1818, 1825),
Barbara Hofland's TheYoungCrusoe (1829), and
Ann Fraser Tytler's Leila, ortheIsland
(1839). In the second chapter, Horne deepens the study of the
robinsonade with novels of that genre which thematize child death:
Frederick Marryat's MastermanReady (1841-42) and
Jefferys Taylor's TheYoungIslanders (1841).
Chapter three highlights a group of works that hybridize the genres of
history and juvenile fiction, including Jefferys Taylor's TheLittleHistorians (1824), Agnes Strickland's HistoricalTalesofIllustriousBritishChildren (1833),
and Harriet Martineau's ThePeasantandthePrince (1841). Finally, chapter four probes gender in juvenile
fiction, with readings of the anonymously published TheBeautifulPage (1802), Barbara Hofland's Adelaide, or, TheIntrepidDaughter (1823), and Agnes Strickland's Alda,
TheBritishCaptive (1841).

It is through character analysis that Horne most effectively
demonstrates what the texts of her alternative archive share with the
familiar works of sentimental fiction. The idealized characters of
didactic fiction and the ordinary characters of sentimental fiction,
she argues, work contiguously insofar as both aimed "to convince their
child readers to model their behavior after the characters about whom
they read" (24). Most critics have assumed that the development of
ordinary characters was a culmination of the post-Enlightenment
Romantic movement: the interiority of individuals thus won out over the
stodgy didacticism of the outmoded exemplary characters they replaced.
But Horne argues that juvenile fiction which experimented with ordinary
characters was "entirely compatible with the goal of teaching children
moral lessons" (24). In short, early juvenile fiction could offer
sentiment and character interiority while also teaching moral lessons.

But here we must pause to inspect Horne's own lessons. Just as her
resistance to period-specific specialization generates some of the
book's most original insights, it also accounts for its greatest
weakness (aside from the distraction caused by frequent typographical
errors). In Horne's account of it, Romanticism is a "refreshing breeze
. . . liberating child readers from repressively didactic
eighteenth-century moral tales by way of imaginative fantasy novels"
(19), and she seems to think that she can contest the modernity of
Romanticism simply by showing that sentimental fiction preserved--to
some degree at least--the pedagogy of virtue ordinarily attributed to
Enlightenment-era didacticism. But Horne's conception of Romanticism is
not rigorously conceived. She clearly reveals the weakness of her
assumptions when she turns to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile; or,
OnEducation (1762) and Wordsworth's poem "We are Seven"
(LyricalBallads 1798). Rousseau's tract and
Wordsworth's poem portray what Horne refers to as "the Romantic child."
Relying heavily on Judith Plotz, from whom she borrows the term, Horne
writes, "The early Romantic poets drew upon and expanded Rousseau's
construction of the inherently virtuous child of nature. . . . [T]his
new 'Romantic child' became the 'sanctuary of valuable but socially
endangered psychic powers -- idealism, holism, vision, animism, faith,
and isolated self-sufficiency'" (Plotz, RomanticismandtheVocationofChildhood [2001], qtd.
95). Further on, quoting the words of Alan Richardson, she defines the
Romantic child as "[e]denic, natural, and asocial" ([from Richardson,
"Childhood and Romanticism" [1992] 95). And furthermore, she
claims, "the Romantic child that appeared in much of the adult poetry
by men did not change, did not grow . . . The child of Romanticism . .
. does not die" (95).

Horne's definition of the Romantic child is reasonably clear. What
remains unclear is the critical relationship between this child and the
Romantic literature that supposedly exemplifies it. In particular,
Horne fails to distinguish in a meaningful way between Rousseau and
Wordsworth, to recognize that they wrote in different genres, for
different ends, and in different historical moments. Arguably, to treat
either Emile or "We are Seven" as representational is
problematic, given their figurative complexity and the fact that both
are self-conscious hybrids of multiple genres. According to Horne,
Rousseau believed that "no child should be formally educated before the
age of 14" and that "a child was born with innate talents and abilities
that would emerge naturally, without any prodding by adults" (11). But
Emile is carefully managed from birth by his Rousseauvian tutor. In
chapter 1, for example, and in keeping with the educational philosophy
of John Locke, the tutor advocates habituating the infant to cold water
by carefully dropping the temperature of his bath each day in a "slow,
successive, and imperceptible" manner until it finally turns ice cold (Emile,
trans. Alan Bloom [1979] 60). The tutor thus aims to make Emile
resilient and flexible enough to face elements beyond his control later
in life, such as inclement weather; if he can be trained to bear the
discomforts of cold water in winter and hot water in summer, then he
will eventually be able to bear cold weather without even the benefit
of coat or hat, if necessary. So while Emile shows how to cultivate
self-sufficiency, its agenda is neither Edenic nor natural. It is part
of a wider prescription for enabling human beings to live safely in
society.

Equally questionable are Horne's claims that Wordsworth "expanded"
Rousseau and that Rousseau influenced the pedagogical forms and ideas
developed in Wordsworth's poetry. Rather than sharing with Rousseau a
conception of the Romantic child, Wordsworth strongly distrusted his
pedagogical model--especially as re-activated by Thomas Wedgewood. In
his "Nursery of Genius," which was directly inspired by Rousseau's Emile,
Wedgewood aimed to cultivate super powers in a chosen child by
carefully controlling its education from infancy to adulthood. But this
"Nursery" was a source of alternating humor and horror for Wordsworth
and Coleridge, whom Wedgwood tapped to be "instructors of Genius" for
the cause. David Erdman has argued that Wedgwood's Rousseauvian ideas
about systematic growth provided a polemical target and a suggestive
source for much of Wordsworth's subsequent writing. As James Chandler
has influentially argued, "Rousseau's educational theory, camouflaging
an elaborate set of controls beneath a surface appearance of freedom
and spontaneity, would have appeared to Wordsworth the most subtle and
insidious of plans. There is an illusion of liberty, but it merely
hides the most rigid of limitations. Everything is calculated" (Englandin1819 [1998] 96). As so many critics have helped us to
see, forms of calculation are certainly present in Wordsworth's poetry,
particularly in "We are Seven," but not in ways that one associates
with the hidden but profound pedagogical coercions of Rousseau's Emile.
In fact, "We are Seven" models a debate between a child and a gentleman
in which the child arguably prevails. Frances Ferguson reads the
gentleman's abandonment of the dialogue at the end as his
acknowledgement and understanding, finally, of what the child has said (SolitudeandtheSublime [1992]). Neither does this poem
support generalizations about the Romantic child and death. As Ferguson
shows, the child speaker figures death by counting it. Seizing on the
complex work of personification in the poem, Ferguson writes, "The
child can know that one sister and one brother are dead and can also
claim the opposite--that they still live and therefore count" by
counting to personify, figuring a betwixtness that neither dispenses
with nor fully acknowledges death (Ferguson 165).

The flatness with which this book treats Romanticism is also
palpable in its account of William Godwin. In Chapter 1, I was
fascinated to learn that as M.J. Godwin and Company, Godwin and his
second wife published the first English translation of Wyss's TheFamilyRobinsonCrusoe; or, JournalofaFatherShipwrecked, withhisWifeandChildren, onanUninhabitedIsland in 1814. But in chapter 3, Godwin is conspicuously absent
from a discussion of the tense relationship between the novel and
history in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. When
Horne contrasts the suspect standing of the novel with the "high
status" and "acceptability" of history, she fails to reckon with
Godwin's 1797 essay "Of History and Romance," which convincingly argues
that history can fully realize itself and justify its claims to power
and truthfulness only through recourse to the imaginative work of
fiction. As it stands, Horne fails to acknowledge the complexity with
which Godwin or any other writer--Mary Robinson's revisionary history
in LettertotheWomenofEngland
(1799) is another strong example--defined the relationship of fiction
and history.

Its treatment of Romanticism notwithstanding, chapter 3 is
particularly strong in its archival contribution and critical
engagement. Examining three texts that blend adolescent fiction and
history, Horne suggestively argues that this subgenre of "fictionalized
history" (132) pushed ahead of the curve of adult history. "It was not
until the late 1840s," she writes, "with the popular acclaim given to
the first volume of Thomas Macaulay's HistoryofEngland
(1848-1861) that what is today known as 'historicism' became the norm .
. . Yet changes in historiographical practice register in several works
of history for children written during the period 1820-1840" (132).

Furthermore, the readings Horne offers to support this claim are
quite convincing. For example, she shows with poignancy how Taylor's TheLittleHistorians combines didactic and sentimental
forms, highlighting a rich constellation of adolescent-specific issues.
To teach his sons the difference between history and fiction, the
character named Father asks them to write on paper what they know of
history so that he can mark in red ink what he finds wrong. Yet while
the father thus seeks to keep history and fiction distinct, the larger
text, Horne argues, "suggests that the project of crafting engaging
juvenile history may depend on deploying certain elements more commonly
associated with fictional discourse" (142). Furthermore, Horne finely
glosses moments in which Father recognizes that he cannot with
integrity defend positions of affiliation or disaffiliation (with such
historical figures as Charles I or Oliver Cromwell) that he
nevertheless demands of his children as English subjects. Thus Horne
demonstrates not only the status of juvenile fiction as an avant-garde
subgenre but also its wider significance for literary history.

Ultimately, the scholarly work of archival recovery in this book is
stronger than the critical work it undertakes, but Horne has undertaken
a great deal. To redefine the span 1800-1840 outside the confines of
prevailing period, field, and generic logic, she had to work across at
least three literary-historical periods and numerous disciplinary
fields, genres, and subgenres. To its great credit, this book richly
explains the pleasures--both casual and formal--of pedagogical
literature. It also makes two major points about adolescent fiction: it
can prompt us to identify with ordinary characters even while
delivering moral lessons, and it can trump its status as a subgenre to
become significant as literature. Lionel Trilling wrote of E.M. Forster
that he was "the only living novelist who can be read again and again
and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us
after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned
something" (Trilling, E.M. Forster: AStudy
[1943]). Given his defense of the novel as a vehicle for both pleasure
and instruction, I think Trilling would have appreciated Horne's work a
great deal.

J.
Jennifer Jones is an Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Rhode Island.